Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Zack vs. the tree

We have been helping out caring for alpacas at another farm. While we are there Zack often likes to climb up in one of the trees:

He is generally afraid of heights so he never goes far, but this tree has a nice bend in the trunk where he can sit. He'll scoot up there and announce he climbs trees.

It was all good until this past Tuesday. The kids had a half day of school so I picked them up and headed over to the farm for chores. Zack was off playing when I hear shouting about Zack being stuck. I start to walk over there and I can hear Zack screaming and wailing. Zack is a high strung kid anyway, add on any thing new or difficult and he freaks out. He was having a huge freak out melt down.

I get to him and can see he is breathing, no obvious blood and I felt up his leg and did not feel it was broken. There was no immediate emergency. I first set out to calm the guy down. He was so freaked out he couldn't focus. Finally got him calmed down when thankfully another adult who lives in the house there came out to help. We thought about calling the fire department but I wanted to first see if we could free him ourselves.

Zack's leg was caught in this crevice:

He had his entire leg wedged in there in just a way he couldn't move.

It didn't help that he was dressed in snow pants and boots and all his winter gear.

I told him that if he could get into the position, he could get out, we just had to reverse his moves. He said he slide down into that position so we had to slide him up out of it. It took two adults to pull and push him up but we finally freed him.

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Oak Haven Alpacas, LLC, & Oak Haven Sheep, LLC

The Adventure of a Lifetime

Our farming adventure began with the purchase of 3 alpacas in the fall of 2007. This eventually grew to an alpaca farm that birthed 23 cria. While we averaged 20 alpacas on a farm at any given time, we hit a peek of over 30 alpacas. We were involved in every aspect of alpaca farming: from breeding decisions, birthing, to attending alpaca shows, and shearing our own alpacas along with making product from their luscious fiber (hand spinning yarn and knitting product). We participated in 24 alpaca shows, and became very involved in the alpaca community.

In 2013 we added hair sheep to our farm.

Throughout this process we continued to tweak and revise our business plan. Our business plan evolved over time, and in 2013 it became clear that our goal was to raise grass fed animals for human consumption. While the initial plan was for this to go along side of alpaca farming, we slowly came to the conclusion our adventure was going to take us somewhere else.

In 2013 we began to sell off our alpaca herd to begin our new adventure with grass fed sheep and cattle.

Our adventure is still unfolding, so please, join us in our adventure of a lifetime as our journey unfolds.